I have been looking for tutorials on changing the skin/look of the current Default UI theme.

Does anyone know of a good Tutorial & Software site that has the utilities needed to create just the theme change?

Essentialy all i want to do is create a custom look to the current UI, for my guild.

Hello,

If you are looking for a program to change models, textures, .etc in the game.. Then sorry to break your heart but thats illegal. There are programs that do this but I am not naming any.

However, if you are looking for a program to change the images of the default interface then the program you are looking for is Photoshop (or other great gfx editing software that accepts tga files). As for tutorials, don't really have any suggestions for that... try to contact T.King, he has awesome skins (mmm gothic) I can also suggest asking him for permission, and then open the tga files in photoshop, add guides and use that as a template for your own gfx.

Have fun! I will look around more for tutorials or anything. I will post whatever I find, if anything.

If you are looking for a program to change models, textures, .etc in the game..

Nope not the ones in the game.

Just basically looking for a means of creating .blps i guess is the file, not sure if that is the one that makes the images. Basically just want to change the look, like TKing did with Goth/Undead/Castle.

From what I read in the EULA, it allows you to make your own files, if you can figure it out, as long as you do not open/modify/save to any file that they have created/installed. Is the way i understood it. But I am no lawyer, so I don't know exactly what they where saying.

To change the skin of the UI you'll have to create/find images to use. The image file WoW uses for it's UI are .tga files. Take note that MS Paint can't open .tga's, you'll need something like Photoshop of Paintshop Pro to create and edit .tga files. You'll have to create/find images for each individual piece of UI that you want changed, reskinning the entire UI is a large undertaking as there are about 50 individual pieces to it.

There are a few ways to go about creating the actual images for each piece. You can create, relatively simple (but very nice and fairly detailed) images using something like Paintshop Pro. Or you could do what T.King does and actually render each UI piece seperately in a 3D rendering program like Maya, 3Dmax, GMAX or similair stuff.

Then, when you have images you like for the seperate UI pieces you have to code the UI so it is functional. This is done by way of XML files. While XML is a fairly simply language, it has many, many variables and can be overwhelming at first, but becomes easier as you learn everything.

As someone above suggested if you are really serious about undertaking a complete UI skin I recomend taking a look at T.King's work. Download one of his full custom skins and open up the files and look around. He won't be upset, or even care really, that you open up his files and check stuff out as long as you don't reuse his images or redistribute them without his permission. After you've taken a look at what's what, if you have any question the Author Forums on this site are a great font of UI-making knowledge and is a great place to start.